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Short filmTranscript
00:00Mysteries can be buried anywhere, under the earth, beneath the sea, or even right under our own feet.
00:14And when we stumble upon them, sometimes what we find can change history.
00:22Tonight, secrets from the skies, like a flying predator that dealt death from above.
00:31This was a massive killer.
00:34They've never seen anything like this.
00:36To a mysterious rock that fell from the stars.
00:41It turns out to be really heavy. He's shocked, and he thinks that maybe this stone is full of gold.
00:48But this is not made of gold. It's something even better and more rare.
00:53To a strange skull found in a cave.
00:56It's abnormally large and bulbous. The eyes seem to be set far apart.
01:01I mean, this is right out of a horror movie.
01:05Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.
01:18It's 2014 in Cincinnati, and a widow named Carol Knight is going through her late husband's belongings in his office.
01:28Much of what she's finding is exactly what you would expect.
01:32Some papers, an old, well-worn pair of sneakers, that kind of thing.
01:37And as she's looking in the back of the closet, she comes upon this white bag.
01:41She lifts it up, and she can hear it make a loud clank.
01:44She opens it, and inside, it's loaded with this technical equipment.
01:49There are these metal coils that run to these odd-looking sensors.
01:53There's, like, straps and tools and a small 1960s film camera.
01:59Usually stuff like this might just get tossed in the trash, or maybe donated to Goodwill or something.
02:05But these aren't just random items.
02:08They belong to Carol's late husband, legendary astronaut, Neil Armstrong.
02:14Obviously, in the astronaut hierarchy, Neil Armstrong sits at the very top.
02:21He's the first person to set foot on the moon.
02:24And in July 1969, 650 million people huddled around their television sets to watch that moment happen.
02:32Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
02:38Obviously, any artifact associated with him or the Apollo 11 mission is going to be extremely valuable.
02:45After he dies in 2012, Carol gives curators from the National Air and Space Museum access to his office.
02:53They come in, and they collect anything that they think might be important for the museum.
02:59Two years later, when Carol finds this bag in the closet, she doesn't know what to make of it.
03:04So before throwing it all away, Carol calls the museum again and sends curator Alan D. Dale a photograph of the contents of the bag.
03:14When Alan sees the photos, he can't believe his eyes.
03:18This looks like stuff from the Apollo 11 mission.
03:22And this means that these items have been to the moon.
03:27That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
03:35Everybody knows the Westinghouse TV camera that took this famous shot.
03:40But there was a second camera, a 16 millimeter mounted on top of the lunar module.
03:47Armstrong and Aldrin used this camera to film themselves while they're tearing around the moon,
03:53taking samples of moon dust and moon rocks and planting the American flag.
03:57So how did this priceless piece of history end up buried in a closet for more than 40 years?
04:04It seems that nobody but Armstrong knew that this camera was in the closet
04:09because it wasn't supposed to even come back to Earth in the first place.
04:13When it comes to space travel, there is no more valuable commodity than mass.
04:18They even have a saying, every ounce matters.
04:22When Apollo 11 returns to Earth, they come back with 50 pounds of moon rocks
04:27that they didn't leave Cape Canaveral with.
04:29So they had to leave an equivalent weight of items behind to compensate for the rocks.
04:34But Armstrong didn't want to leave the prized camera on the moon.
04:38It seems that Armstrong makes an executive decision to take the 16 millimeter film camera back.
04:46And he keeps this secret. He doesn't tell NASA. He doesn't even tell his wife for decades.
04:52And now Armstrong's secret camera could turn out to be worth a fortune.
04:57Buzz Aldrin's Apollo 11 jacket sells for $2.8 million in 2022.
05:04And bags used to collect rock samples sell for $2 million at auction.
05:08And they don't even have moon rock in them anymore.
05:11So can you imagine what this camera would sell for?
05:14Carol Knight, however, does not cash in.
05:17Instead, she donates the camera to the Space Museum for public display.
05:22You can still go see it today.
05:25And it helps to ensure that Armstrong's legacy will carry on.
05:31Uncovering a priceless NASA relic in a closet is one thing.
05:36But imagine literally stumbling over something even more valuable that fell from the sky.
05:42The Maryborough Park in Melbourne, Australia is right in the middle of the gold fields region, which is where the 19th century gold rush boomed.
05:53Its golden age is over, but amateur gold rushers and tourists still try their luck hoping to get the odd nugget.
06:01In 2015, David Hole is walking around the park, not expecting to find much.
06:08He digs here and there for fun.
06:10But as he's walking through some thick red clay, he practically trips over a medium sized rock.
06:17He wonders if something might be under it.
06:20He tries to move it out of the way, but it turns out to be really heavy.
06:25He's shocked and he thinks that maybe this stone is full of gold.
06:30David excitedly lugs the stone back home and once he's there, he breaks out his angle grinder to crack it open and get to the prize inside.
06:41But as he goes to cut it open, the angle grinder can't even make a dent.
06:46Then he tries smashing it with a sledgehammer, but the sledge just bounces right back off.
06:53He tries acid, but again, no dice.
06:57He's never seen anything like it.
06:59This thing has not a scratch on it.
07:01Whatever it actually is, it's clearly no gold nugget.
07:05Unlike the rock itself, David's dreams of a big payday are shattered.
07:09So he brings it to the Melbourne Museum to see if anyone can figure out what exactly it is.
07:16Museum scientists examine the indestructible lump and have both good and bad news for David.
07:23The bad news is that as David suspected, this is not made of gold.
07:28But the good news is that it's something even better and more rare.
07:34It's a meteorite.
07:36Over the last 37 years, this museum curator has examined thousands of rocks people thought were meteorites.
07:44But so far, only two had delivered on that promise.
07:48So finding a meteorite is extremely rare.
07:51To unlock the secrets inside, scientists need to look deeper.
07:56Carbon dating puts the rocks arrival on Earth somewhere between about a hundred to a thousand years ago.
08:03But to get the full story, the lab has to crack this rock open, which is easier said than done.
08:10The outer shells of meteorites are hardened by their passage through the Earth's atmosphere, which generates an enormous amount of heat.
08:19It's like putting them in a super forge, the same way we would harden steel.
08:25To crack it open, they need the hardest tool they have.
08:28It takes a diamond blade saw to finally cut into the rock.
08:32And what they find inside is a blend of rare minerals and a high concentration of iron.
08:39Based on its makeup, experts believe that it came from the huge asteroid belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter and may have even been part of a core of a planet that failed to form.
08:53Incredibly, David's rock turns out to be far more valuable than gold.
09:00Because they're so rare, meteorites can be worth anywhere between $10,000 to $1,000 per gram.
09:07This one weighs 37 pounds or about 17,000 grams.
09:13So it could be worth millions.
09:15For now, David's meteorite is on display at the Melbourne Museum.
09:19Time will tell if David decides to finally cash in on his find or keep it in the museum as the world's most indestructible nest egg.
09:28The Bermuda Triangle is famous for swallowing ships and pulling planes from the sky.
09:38But when treasure hunters dig up planes lost in World War II, they uncover a mystery no one expected.
09:49In the spring of 1991, explorers from the scientific search project of New York City are scouring the ocean floor off Fort Lauderdale looking for gold from old Spanish galleons.
10:03Graham Hawks is leading a search using a small submarine with a remote camera.
10:08But as he patrols the sea floor, he sees something that distracts him.
10:14What Hawks and his team have just found is the wreckage of a World War II era TBM Avenger torpedo bomber.
10:22And it's not alone.
10:24They find not two, not three, but five Avenger bombers all on the bottom of the Atlantic and all within about a mile of each other.
10:33They seem too close together for it to be a coincidence.
10:37The only logical conclusion seems to be that they were flying together and then all went down at the same time.
10:44To the cruise historians, the clues point to a single infamous case, the disappearance of Flight 19.
10:53In December 1945, three months after the end of World War II, five Avenger bombers take off from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Base on a routine training mission.
11:05The lead plane starts experiencing compass trouble and the pack gets disoriented.
11:12Radio contact with the naval base in Fort Lauderdale becomes fainter and fainter.
11:18The base is struggling to track the position of the planes.
11:23It's almost as if something is interrupting or interfering with the signal.
11:28Eventually, radio contact with all five planes is lost.
11:40Night falls and the pilots and planes of Flight 19 are never heard from again.
11:45The planes vanish without a trace in a vast, merciless area of ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle.
11:53No other incident fuels the mystique of the Bermuda Triangle more than the loss of Flight 19.
12:00So solving that mystery while looking for Spanish gold could be the only thing luckier than actually finding Spanish gold.
12:08The find is too compelling to ignore.
12:11So Hawks' team takes a closer look at the planes.
12:14They need to look for identifying markers.
12:17So they comb through the videos and first they make out the letters F and T,
12:23which means that these planes did take off from Fort Lauderdale, just like Flight 19.
12:28They also make out the number 28 on the tail of one plane,
12:33which partially matches up to one of the missing Flight 19 planes.
12:37So at this point, they're very excited.
12:39Then they find more tail numbers, but these do not line up with Flight 19.
12:44And at least some of these planes are under armed, which suggests that they're actually older planes than the ones who flew in Flight 19.
12:53As Hawks and his team uncover more evidence, it starts to tell a different story, one that only deepens the mystery.
13:02So it turns out that not only is this not the Flight 19 group, but these planes, which crashed basically on top of each other, didn't even crash at the same time.
13:11These crashes span years, going back to 1943.
13:15So now, instead of solving one Bermuda Triangle mystery, researchers now have two unsolved mysteries.
13:23The Bermuda Triangle isn't the only place famous aircraft vanish.
13:32Sometimes they turn up in the last place you'd expect.
13:35It's the fall of 2023, and business partners Dustin Riach and Jason Revis have just popped the lock on a storage unit in Van Nuys, California.
13:48They won an online auction for the contents of the unit, sight unseen.
13:54Revis calls the gamble shooting dice in the dark.
13:57These storage units can come packed with old clothes or holiday decorations or sometimes even hazardous materials.
14:04On occasion, though, they might actually have something valuable.
14:07They pop open some boxes and they find some nitrate film rolls from the 1800s and the 1900s, which might be worth a couple of bucks, but it's really not anything of profound value.
14:19Then they start opening some garbage bags and Jason pulls out a model of a spaceship.
14:26They realize that this is a model of the USS Enterprise and figure that it might have some value to Star Trek fans.
14:34Dustin and Jason decide to list it on eBay to see how much they can get for it.
14:40As soon as the auction goes live, people start freaking out because the base of this model has a business card with the name of the model maker.
14:48Richard C. Dayton.
14:51Richard C. Dayton is nothing short of a legend in the Star Trek community.
14:55In fact, he built the original model of the Starship Enterprise in 1966.
15:02He built the one that goes soaring across the screen in the opening credits of Gene Roddenberry's series.
15:09But that original piece of Trekkie treasure has been missing for decades and fans online think this could be the original prototype.
15:19Back in 1979, the makers of Star Trek The Motion Picture borrowed the model from Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator, and never gave it back, even though Gene would send letter after letter begging for its return.
15:34Dustin and Jason pull the item from eBay and bring it to the Heritage Auction House for verification.
15:41Sure enough, this is the original Enterprise model that's been missing for over 40 years, and its value is estimated at $800,000.
15:52To this day, nobody knows how the model ended up in the storage unit, but the discovery sends shockwaves through the Star Trek universe, and it doesn't take long for the original creator's family to step in.
16:06Now, even though the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry, died in 1991, his son Gene Jr. hears about the model and he wants it back.
16:14I mean, his dad didn't give it away. His dad loaned it out. He feels it should definitely be part of his estate.
16:20Revis and Reoc strike a deal to return the model to Roddenberry's son in exchange for $500,000.
16:27It's not $800,000, but it's a lot more than they expected to get out of the model when they posted it on eBay.
16:37Exploring the ocean can reveal strange things. In 2022, divers uncovered a tragic piece of space history.
16:50It's 2022, and underwater explorer Mike Barnett and rec specialist Jimmy Godomsky are diving off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
17:02They're part of a documentary crew searching for a downed rescue plane that went missing in the 1940s.
17:09The particular aircraft that they're looking for is a PBM Mariner flying boat.
17:14It's got a large superstructure, and it'll be easily recognizable because of its top-mounted inverted gull wings.
17:21On the ocean floor, Mike spots a shape that's buried under coral sand,
17:25and his gut is leading him to believe that it's part of a wing of that PBM Mariner plane, so he decides to check it out.
17:33They use blowers to delicately remove sand and coral fragments from the object.
17:41But as the sand blows off, they see something that doesn't make sense.
17:46They uncover what appears to be a series of white bricks or cobblestones mounted to the object.
17:53Now, even though it appears to have been buried for a long time, these bricks are still very white with no signs of any rust or oxidation.
18:01They seem to be made of a composite that neither of them recognize.
18:06Mike realizes this isn't a World War II plane, but the location of the wreck gives him another idea.
18:15They're just offshore from Cape Canaveral, which launches rockets all the time.
18:20And parts of rockets like boosters are designed to fall back into the ocean from 50 miles up.
18:26But this thing is flat and wide, and so it can't be a rocket booster.
18:32As he heads back to shore, Mike calls a former astronaut friend named Bruce Melnick to look at the video.
18:38It takes Melnick all of two seconds to recognize those white bricks.
18:42These are heat tiles of the type that were used on the space shuttle to protect it from heat during reentry.
18:49Then Melnick says something that stops everyone in their tracks.
18:54Melnick is sure that if there's a big piece of a space shuttle just off the coast of Florida, it belonged to Challenger.
19:03Challenger, go with throttle up.
19:10When space shuttle Challenger detonates in the skies above Cape Canaveral in January 1986, it sends the entire country into mourning.
19:22It kills all seven crew members, including school teacher Krista McAuliffe, who was supposed to be the first civilian in space.
19:33Obviously, there's a scramble to see what caused this horrific tragedy.
19:37So the Navy undertakes the biggest salvage operation in history.
19:41But it's an incredibly difficult mission because debris is spread across 500 square miles of ocean.
19:48They collect over 100 tons of wreckage.
19:54And that wreckage, combined with film footage, reveals that the fault is an O-ring, a little rubber gasket in a rocket booster that was responsible for triggering the explosion.
20:05Mike brings footage from his dive to NASA program director Mike Cinelli, hoping to confirm that what they found truly is a piece of the Challenger shuttle.
20:16And I'm always a little cautious because, as you know, we've launched rockets for over 70 years.
20:21So there's a lot of objects out there.
20:23But after looking at the object in greater detail, you've discovered Challenger.
20:30I certainly can't thank you enough for showing me this.
20:36It's powerful.
20:37Everyone who was alive and conscious at the time remembers where they were when it happened.
20:45Seeing this artifact is enough to bring you right back to that moment in history.
20:51Lots of deadly things can descend from above, but few are as frightening as one giant predator that once ruled over Canada's skies.
21:05In 1992, a professional nature photographer explores the snow-covered terrain in Alberta, Canada.
21:15As she scans the blank white canvas and contemplates her next shot, she spots something odd on the ground.
21:21And as she gets up close, she realizes it could be a fossil.
21:24She's curious. She gently chips away at the frozen soil all around this object.
21:31And sure enough, she begins to see a massive form take shape.
21:35It looks like a long neck, gigantic wing bones, and a rib cage.
21:42Now, she's no dinosaur expert, but she does feel like she stumbled onto something special.
21:48She calls the Royal Tyrell Museum, and once their paleontologists look at the specimen,
21:53they determine it's a kind of pterosaur known as Quetzalcoatlus,
21:57a giant flying reptile that once ruled the skies 77 million years ago.
22:02It's a magnificent find.
22:05But in the fossil world, this is old news, since the species was already discovered in Texas back in 1972.
22:13So the fossils are exhumed and basically forgotten about.
22:16Sometimes, however, even the experts can miss something.
22:20In 2019, another team of paleontologists pulls the fossils out of mothballs to take a second look.
22:27But this time, looking at the morphology, they see something doesn't add up.
22:30The neck on this specimen is shorter and wider than the Quetzalcoatlus from Texas.
22:37They've never seen anything like this.
22:39This is a new, badass species of a super predator.
22:44Like her Texas cousin, this was a massive killer.
22:48We're talking a 32-foot wingspan, which is equivalent to a four-seater Cessna plane.
22:53The head was huge, about three times longer than the actual length of its body.
22:59In fact, one expert described it as a giant flying murder head.
23:03This ancient flying eating machine is dubbed Cryodrakon Boreus, Greek for frozen dragon of the North Wind.
23:12But around the lab and in the press, it becomes known as the ice dragon.
23:17It likely fed on a diet of lizards and baby dinos, but because this ice dragon had no teeth, it would swallow prey whole using its powerful neck muscles.
23:29But for this particular ice dragon, dinner didn't go as planned.
23:33The Alberta specimen is covered in battle scars.
23:38In fact, one of the leg fossils has a velociraptor tooth embedded into it.
23:44Experts can't tell if this is what killed the ice dragon, but what they can tell is that it died young, probably a teenager.
23:51It's the first of its kind ever found in Canada, and one of the best preserved flying reptiles ever discovered on the continent.
24:00Taken out before it had realized its full terrifying potential.
24:09For centuries, people have looked to the skies for answers, but in Mexico, one teenager finds something buried underground that seems to come from the stars.
24:21It's the 1930s, and somewhere in Copper Canyon, about 100 miles south of Chihuahua, Mexico, a teenage girl on vacation stumbles across an abandoned mine.
24:33This area is littered with these old abandoned mine shafts, and the girl's parents tell her to stay away from them because they could be dangerous.
24:40Naturally, her curiosity gets the best of her, and she goes in and she's crawling through the dust and the dirt, even though the ceiling of one of these mines could collapse in on her at any moment.
24:50At the end of one tunnel, she comes across something that stops her in her tracks.
24:55In the corner of this dark, dusty cavern, she makes out what looks like a body.
25:02And as she gets closer to it, she sees it is an adult skeleton.
25:06As she continues looking around, she notices something chilling.
25:13Next to that skeleton is a mound of dirt, and sticking out from it is this small, misshapen skeleton hand.
25:20And that little hand is holding hands with the first skeleton.
25:25I mean, this is right out of a horror movie.
25:29Still unafraid, this 13-year-old girl starts uncovering the second skeleton.
25:35The first thing she notices is the body is the size of a child.
25:42But when she gets to the skull, she can tell that it looks strange.
25:47Compared to the rest of the body, the skull is unnaturally large and bulbous with wide, sad eyes.
25:55It's so strange that she just has to have it.
25:59She winds up taking both skulls home with her and tucks them away in a storage area where they stay undisturbed for decades.
26:07After the girl passes away, the skulls end up in the hands of family friends who turn over the specimens to a researcher named Lloyd Pye.
26:19Pye is not your typical biologist or researcher.
26:22He's an author and proponent of what's called the intervention theory,
26:26which basically argues that aliens visited the Earth and, among other things, genetically contributed to modern humans.
26:34As Pye studies the skull, he gets very excited.
26:37He remarks that the bulbous head and offset eyes are consistent with alleged eyewitness accounts of so-called gray aliens.
26:48Gray aliens are those stereotypical big-headed, big-eyed aliens often depicted in science fiction.
26:56Pye is convinced that the skull is not human and names it the star child skull.
27:04He looks at the skull and wonders now if this might be evidence of an alien-human hybrid,
27:10essentially the missing link that he's been looking for.
27:13He raises money to do carbon dating and DNA testing of the skull.
27:18When his test results come back, Pye claims that they show the skull dates back to 900 years ago.
27:25The sample shows lots of human DNA, but Pye claims that there are elements that the lab can't account for.
27:33And Pye argues that these holes in the DNA sample must be where the alien contributions are.
27:40Eventually, mainstream scientists are able to retest samples from the skull and fill in some of those previous gaps in the skull's DNA.
27:47Turns out, they disagree with Lloyd.
27:51They argue that the star child skull is not evidence of a gray alien-human hybrid.
27:56Instead, they say that it's a male human with a birth defect probably like hydrocephalus,
28:02informally known as water on the brain, which can cause the kinds of features that appear in this skull.
28:07But Pye and his followers are not backing down and no scientist or evidence is going to dissuade them from their beliefs.
28:16Lloyd fights this battle right until he dies in 2013, eight decades after the star child skull is pulled from that abandoned mine shaft outside Chihuahua.
28:27As for his followers, they believe the truth is still out there.
28:31Almost a century later, another teenager makes an incredible find, one that lies far beyond our solar system.
28:43It's 2019, and 17-year-old aspiring astrophysicist and Star Wars superfan Wolf Kukir has landed his dream job as a NASA intern.
28:54In addition to standard intern duties like fetching coffee and making copies, he's tasked with analyzing data of variations in star brightness using NASA's TESS satellite.
29:09TESS stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is a fancy acronym for a very powerful space telescope that is shot into orbit in 2018 to look for planets outside our solar system.
29:22He's asked to comb through brightness data, also known as a star's light curve, which is essentially its brightness versus time.
29:29These are pretty pictures of stars. These are pretty much just dots on a page. If the brightness doesn't change, the dot stays in the same place. If it gets dimmer, the dot goes down.
29:41For the scientists, this is kind of like grunt work. But for Wolf, as an intern, he is in heaven.
29:47On day three of his internship, Wolf stumbles upon a light curve that gets his blood pumping.
29:57It's a two-star system that sits in the Pictor constellation. As he's looking at this light curve, he sees a dip that comes in intervals.
30:05This represents the star dimming and then coming back to full brightness. That suggests a third object orbiting both of these stars.
30:16An excited Wolf leaps to his feet, straightens his name tag, and in his most confident intern voice, tells his NASA supervisor he thinks he's got something worth looking at.
30:26When Wolf's boss looks at the computer screen, he is absolutely stunned.
30:33This intern on his third day of the job, somehow in the cold expanse of space 1,300 light years away, has stumbled across a previously undiscovered planet orbiting two stars at once.
30:48Now, if you're a Star Wars fan like Wolf, you know that Luke Skywalker's home planet had two suns.
30:57And just like Tatooine in Star Wars, if you were to look up in the sky from the surface of this newly discovered planet, you would see two sunsets.
31:06But in this case, the planet is so hot, you would also be vaporized.
31:12This is a remarkable discovery because this is the first time the test satellite was able to discover a planet orbiting a double star system.
31:22And it was found by a high school student.
31:26The astronomers leading this study published their results in a major international science journal, and they do a very classy thing.
31:33They include 17-year-old high school intern Wolf as a co-author.
31:38But it's not all good news for Wolf, because even though he's the guy who discovered the planet, he's not allowed to name it.
31:47NASA names it TOI 1338B, which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
31:53Some reporters ask Wolf if he's disappointed by the name.
31:57And he says his brother suggested they call it Wolf-topia, which, let's face it, is far more awesome.
32:07High in the Andes, two climbers reached the summit of a frozen peak.
32:12But instead of a breathtaking view, they discovered a clue from an old mystery.
32:17It's a cool day in January of 1998 on the Chilean-Argentinian border.
32:25Mountain climbers Pablo Reguera and Fernando Germandia are summiting one of the highest peaks in the area, Mount Tupangana.
32:34As they cross the 15,000 foot mark, they notice something in the distance.
32:38As they get closer, it becomes obvious that what they're looking at is some sort of engine.
32:45And a quick wipe of the valve cover on top reveals the words Rolls-Royce.
32:52Now, obviously, nobody has taken their luxury automobile three miles up a mountain in Argentina.
32:57So the two conclude that what they must be looking at is an airplane engine.
33:01There are no recent reports of crashes or missing airplanes anywhere in the area.
33:06And while the engine looks pretty banged up, it's tough to tell just how long it's been there.
33:12A quick search of the area reveals what appears to be a damaged fuselage, as well as some strips of sun-bleached clothing.
33:20At this point, the mountain climbers realize that this is definitely a crash site.
33:24The question is, from when?
33:28They snap a few photos, and they head back down the mountain and report it.
33:32This is enough to raise interest in mounting a full expedition.
33:36And so volunteers from the Argentinian army form a caravan.
33:41Trucks, men, even mules to try to get to places where the trucks can't go on the mountain.
33:46When the team reaches the crash site, they spread out and comb over the area.
33:50Then the search takes a gruesome turn.
33:52It's a gruesome turn.
33:53They find human body parts scattered across the crash site.
33:59Parts of five different bodies are ultimately discovered, all preserved atop this frozen mountain.
34:07The team then turns over their findings to Argentine scientists.
34:10Over the next two years, they conduct DNA testing and eventually confirm the identities of all five individuals.
34:18As they notify the families, they realize these victims are all linked by one thing.
34:24They were all on a plane that vanished nearly 50 years ago.
34:27On August 2nd, 1947, a decommissioned World War II bomber, now converted into a passenger plane called the Stardust, takes off from Buenos Aires with 11 people on board, bound for Santiago.
34:41There's a snowstorm that day, as well as a strong headwind.
34:46Then just four minutes before the aircraft is scheduled to land in Santiago, the pilot sends a Morse code message announcing his estimated time of arrival, followed by a cryptic message.
34:59Stendek.
35:01The radio man in Santiago has never heard this phrase.
35:04He asks for the message to be repeated, and it comes back the same twice more.
35:09Stendek. Stendek.
35:11The signal cuts off without warning, and the plane simply disappears.
35:18The Argentine and Chilean air forces send up aircraft searching for wreckage of Stardust, and yet they find nothing.
35:28It's like it simply disappeared off the face of the earth.
35:30For 50 years, the fate of Stardust remained an aviation cold case, but now there's a chance to solve it all because some mountain climbers tripped over its engine.
35:41From what investigators can tell, the plane crashed into the side of the mountain during a controlled descent.
35:47The visibility would have been bad, and if the crew hadn't accounted for the strong headwinds, they may have thought they were past the Andes when they began their descent.
35:56Under whiteout conditions, they may never have even seen the mountain before they collided with it.
36:02And if the collision was violent enough, it may have triggered an avalanche that buried Stardust, obscuring it from the view of the search and rescue aircraft that were looking for it.
36:15With the fate of the people aboard figured out, one question remains, what does Stendek mean?
36:23Some think that it might be some sort of abbreviated distress message like, severe turbulence encountered, now descending, expect crash.
36:32But there's no proof of this. And why tag a routine arrival message with this complicated acronym?
36:41We may never crack the code of Stendek, but at least the families of the passengers and crew of the Stardust now know the fate of their loved ones.
36:50And this 50-year-old aviation cold case is, at least partly, closed.
37:02Sometimes mysteries about the heavens aren't found above us, but instead are buried deep in the ground, like one ancient object discovered in Germany.
37:12In 1999, in a remote part of Nebra, Germany, metal detectorists Henry Westfall and Mario Renner are on the hunt for coins and other trinkets that they can pawn to subsidize their hobby.
37:28As they swing their metal detector over the ground, they hear that high-pitched whine.
37:34And that gets them really excited, because this is what they're here for.
37:38They start digging with small shovels and then pickaxes.
37:43And as they dig, their signal gets stronger and stronger.
37:47And soon they uncover something large and flat.
37:52It's a bronze sword.
37:56And it's old, possibly ancient.
37:59They wave the metal detector over the now-empty hole.
38:03And to their amazement, they still have a signal.
38:08Finally, one of them gets their hands wrapped around a particularly stubborn piece.
38:12Whatever this is, it's wide and round and much tougher to free.
38:17They use the pickaxe to jostle a little bit, and finally, this strange object emerges from the ground.
38:23This piece is kind of disc-shaped, and it has the image of a golden crescent moon and stars.
38:32They don't know what to make of it, but they think that it's got to be worth something.
38:38To the finders, it looks like treasure.
38:41But in the eyes of the law, it's contraband.
38:45In Germany, this kind of stuff is considered state property.
38:49You're not allowed to keep it, and you're supposed to have a license just to hunt for it.
38:53Let's just say Henry and Mario haven't exactly filled out the proper paperwork.
38:58So they're in a pickle here.
39:00They want to make some money, but they don't want to get caught, so they got to move fast.
39:03The next day, they race to a dealer in Cologne who gives them 31,000 Deutschmarks.
39:11That's equivalent to about $17,000 today.
39:14As the men disappear to count their money, their strange disc creates a buzz in the underground collector world.
39:22For years, the disc passes from collector to collector, rising in value to over half a million bucks.
39:29But still, nobody knows exactly what it is.
39:34Experts dated to the Bronze Age around 1600 BCE, but it's the markings that actually fuel speculation.
39:43Some astronomers note that a cluster of stars on the disc seems to correspond to the constellation Pleiades.
39:50And on the side of the disc, there is a long arc with a very precise measurement of 82.5 degrees.
39:59This corresponds to the difference between sunsets at winter and summer solstice.
40:05Soon, experts start to think maybe this strange disc is the oldest graphical representation of astronomical phenomena ever discovered.
40:16It's dubbed the Nebra Sky Disc, and German officials are eager to get their hands on it.
40:24One seller who's looking to unload it for a cool million gets busted in a sting operation.
40:30And the government is getting ready to throw the book at them for selling black market antiques.
40:34Looking for leniency, they provide information that leads authorities back to Henry Westfall and Mario Renner.
40:42Henry and Mario get arrested on the grounds of treasure hunting without a license and stealing state property.
40:48So now, it looks like they're gonna have to spend that 31,000 Deutschmarks they got to pay for some lawyers.
40:54After a short trial, Henry and Mario are sentenced to four to ten months in jail.
41:00As for the Sky Disc, well, it's now kept in a state museum where people can visit and continue to speculate about whether it is indeed the first depiction of the cosmos.
41:10Cameras on the moon, wreckage in the sea, and treasures pointing towards the stars.
41:20Some mysteries from the skies go far beyond anything we expect.
41:24I'm Danny Troyo.
41:26Thanks for watching.
41:27Mysteries on Earth.
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